Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

EVENTS

Dumbass Quote of the Day

You’ve probably already seen this by now, but I missed it for a couple days. Ken Crow, founder of the Tea Party Community, spoke at an anti-immigration rally near the capitol along with Rep. Steve King, Sen. Ted Cruz and others, and delivered this humdinger of a statement:

From those incredible blood lines of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and John Smith. And all these great Americans, Martin Luther King. These great Americans who built this country. You came from them. And the unique thing about being from that part of the world, when you learn about breeding, you learn that you cannot breed Secretariat to a donkey and expect to win the Kentucky Derby. You guys have incredible DNA and don’t forget it.

Um. What? Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Martin Luther King came from the same “blood lines”? And donkeys? And DNA? Whiskey tango foxtrot? The rally was organized by John Tanton, a notorious racist and advocate of eugenics.

Why do the stupidest, most inbred morons think that stupid, inbred morons are the apogee of the species?
In any event, as a person of mixed-background(*1) and mixed-parentage(*2) myself, I can attest to my own hybrid vigour.

1. Anglo and Saxon. That counts, right?
2. One of each sex. True story.

Zeno“If George Washington’s bloodline is still around, it wasn’t with Martha’s help.”
They’re the Founding Fathers. George Washington sprayed his seed across this Great Nation; a deluge of Patriotic Foundingness, flowing outward from him, blanketing the country from sea to shining sea in his essence.
What do you think Washington State is made out of? That’s right: It’s pure George Washington.

The comments are worse apparently.
-Liberals are the real racists because, um, reasons and shut up that’s why
-He didn’t mean the kind of DNA you inherit anyway but the sort that comes from voting Republican – sounds like a viral infection to me.
-The article is biased because it isn’t about how terrible Obama is.

“We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A’, huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts!” —- John Winger, Stripes (1981)

Zeno Most of the eastern seaboard is littered with signs reading “Washington slept here”.

Huh, until you gave context on who it was, I was gonna say that the speaker was probably using “DNA” metaphorically. Like e.g. saying “Americans just love to super-size stuff — it’s in our national DNA!” But given the speaker, it seems he must have meant it literally. Especially ironic to have included MLK. heh… Although, I suppose Jefferson and MLK might have shared some DNA, nudge-nudge, wink-wink…

SLC at 19:
It was Fawn Brodie who , decades ago, dropped the Sally Hemings –Thomas Jefferson affair onto the white community of Charlottesville. Fawn and her husband having a mutual interest in how best to wage thermonuclear warfare, heh heh.

The levels of stupidity that annoy me, at least until I increase the resolution for viewing the fractal wrongness:

1. The message that DNA is destiny. Sorry, unlike racing horses, many of us humans aren’t heavily dependent on inherited muscular potential, cardiopulmonary efficiency, or anything like that. We’re talking about the US, a developed nation, where brains are usually the organ that wins the day. Humans as a species have this thing known as plasticity. We succeed because we have big, flexible brains, and those brains get powerful because of educational environments. Individual differences in DNA contribute much less.

2. That certain people are depicted as another species. Nope. We’re all humans. People of mixed lineage can breed just as readily as supposedly purebred people can.

3. That superiority is an objective, universal thing. Sorry, it’s circumstantial because everything is a tradeoff. Building up muscles costs resources, which means that sometimes being weaker is an advantage because you’re able to spend those resources on something productive, rather than waste them building unnecessarily large muscles.

4. That victory at the Kentucky Derby is treated as the only measure of success in a horse breed. As I understand it, race horses are specialized for speed at the cost of their limbs: Their long, thin legs are good for running speed, but much more prone to breaking than those of their wild ancestors. People also use work horses for pulling heavy loads, rather than rapidly transporting a human across a race track, so they have different ideas of what makes a good horse. Heck, mules (the mentioned horse/donkey hybrids) were often favored for such purposes. We also use horses for shows, where breeding for intelligence would help them learn entertaining tricks.

5. In some non-human animals, we’ve carried purebreeding to points I’d consider cruelty to animals due to the health problems they suffer, and yet presumably this is a desirable goal in humans? Even if we could do it, why should we? Look at all the jobs our societal infrastructure depends on. Different jobs depend on different abilities. Diversity and versatility are humanity’s strengths because they allow us to produce generalists and many kinds of specialists. We have division of labor in advanced societies because no one needs to be able to do everything by themselves. We’re social creatures, not solitary ones.

6. Normal people don’t view humans as beasts of burden to be selectively bred. We value humanity because we’re conscious beings who can think and feel. We do like productive citizens, but we don’t make presumptions about a person’s productive potential based on their DNA. That neural flexibility comes back into play because humans with “obvious” genetic disadvantages can still contribute to society in various, sometimes unexpected ways.

7. The mention of Martin Luther King (presumably Jr.) to not sound racist. Too transparent. It also ignores that his career as a human rights advocate was most likely due to growing up in times when ignorant people were touting genetic superiority and using it as an excuse to discriminate against those who didn’t live up to their ideals of “American” racial purity. His DNA didn’t give him that.

I’m most appalled by the lack of historical knowledge, although I am not shocked by it.

From those incredible blood lines of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and John Smith.

Let’s see, two of those bloodlines, at least officially, are dead. Neither Washington nor John Smith left any known surviving children. In fact, I was taught in school that Washington was sterile from the measles. As for Jefferson’s bloodline, we’ve already heard from several commenters about the relationship with Sally Hemings, which resulted in twice as many surviving children as his marriage to Martha Wayles, Hemings’ half-sister. Of course, we don’t know how extensive Jefferson’s surviving bloodline is, as two of his children are lost to history, after they “escaped” slavery on his farm when they reached adulthood (all signs are that they left with their father’s blessing and chose to pass as white people).

Somehow I don’t think all that race mixing was really what the speaker had in mind, ya know?

Wait. Hold on. They call themselves the Tea Party, they name themselves after an event that was a turning point towards USAmerican independence, and this guy can’t think of a single nonwhite person who was actually involved in the actual struggle for USAmerican independence? Seriously?

How about Crispus Attucks, whose courage in standing up to the Redcoats provoked the Boston Massacre? How about James Armistead, (later James Lafayette) whose intelligence led to the victories that ended the war?